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gewg_ writes:

El Reg reports:

If you fancy spending your next European airline flight sitting next to someone who's carrying on a protracted conversation via mobile phone, you're in luck.

The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has issued new guidance to European airlines allowing them to permit passengers to keep phones and other portable electronic devices (PEDs) switched on throughout flights, regardless of whether the devices are in "airplane mode."

"This is the latest regulatory step towards enabling the ability to offer 'gate-to-gate' telecommunication or WiFi services," the agency said on Friday.

The regulators define PEDs as "any kind of electronic device brought on board the aircraft by a passenger such as a tablet, a laptop, a smartphone, an e-reader or a MP3 player."

EASA loosened its restrictions on devices in 2013 such that passengers don't have to switch them off, provided their Wi-Fi, cellular, Bluetooth, and other radios are disabled.

With the new guidance issued on Friday, airplane mode becomes something of a misnomer, as passengers are free to leave their devices' radios active throughout takeoff, landing, and the flight itself.

That's not to say airlines have been given a rubber stamp to let passengers do whatever they want. Each carrier must go through an assessment process to ensure that aircraft are not affected by transmissions coming from passengers' devices -- and submitting to the assessment is entirely voluntary.

mtrycz writes:

BloombergView, ThisAmericanLife and ProPublica (prequel) are running a story on a FED employee, Carmen Segarra, tasked with regulating GoldmanSachs. Segarra attended regular meetings with GoldmanSachs representatives and her fellow regulators. The meetings would often include things like:

Segarra decided to tape the meetings.

After a confrontation with her boss about not faking a report about the fact that Goldman didn't have a conflict of interest policy, Segarra got fired. She has released 47 hours of the recordings she's made over time. BloombergView concludes:

tonyPick writes:

Centauri Dreams has a piece on the History and Future of Solar Sails. Particularly interesting is the mention of Lightsail, The Planetary Society's CubeSat-based light sails.

There's a mission trailer video available, and from Centauri Dreams:

This piece was inspired by the recent 100 Year Starship symposium presentation by Les Johnson, Senior Technical Assistant for the Advanced Concepts Office (and former Manager of Interstellar Propulsion Technology Research) at the NASA.

Les has written a number of papers on Solar Sails, and there's a recent talk on Light Sails at 1h19m in a (ridiculously long) video of the 2013 Icarus Interstellar Congress.

AnonTechie writes:

As part of an ongoing effort to streamline and focus its business, Yahoo today announced ( http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/98474044364/progress-report-continued-product-focus ) that it was retiring its namesake product at the end of the year.

In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo, graduate students at Stanford University, created a hierarchical directory of websites, "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." In March of that year, they gave it the name "Yahoo!," for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle."

In the early days of the Web, these categorized, human-curated Web listings were all the rage. Search engines existed, but rapidly became notorious for their poor result quality. On a Web that was substantially smaller than the one we enjoy today, directories were a useful alternative way of finding sites of interest.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/09/yahoo-killing-off-yahoo-after-20-years-of-hierarchical-organization/

tt0106977 writes:

A highly praised privacy function in Apple's latest operating system that is designed to thwart tracking may not be as effective as originally thought.

The feature, known as MAC-address randomization, first revealed in June, is designed to prevent unwanted retail tracking that occurs as consumers move around malls and retail shops by randomizing the unique code that smartphones use to identify themselves as they search for nearby WiFi networks.

Misra found that the Apple privacy feature only works on select phones, namely the iPhone 5s and newer, when the phone is locked and location capabilities such as GPS are disabled. That means the privacy protections go away if you use a fitness-tracking app or check your text messages briefly while shopping. Older iPhone users are also out of luck.

According to Misra, most iPhone users won't benefit from the feature, which is only active when users have disabled all location privacy sharing and their phones aren't in use. That significantly narrows the likelihood that users will use this feature, he said. If, for example, you wake up your phone to send a text message or check Twitter, your phone will still broadcast the unique code -- known as a MAC address -- as normal, even when you're using your carrier’s data connection and not WiFi.

"If you're using the phone, it doesn't randomize," he said in an interview with The Post. "It's only randomizing if the location services are off and [the phone] is in sleep mode. There's only a small percentage of people who would do that."

gewg_ writes:

El Reg reports

The trial is a DHL Parcel research project [Google translation] that flies to Juist, a tiny North Sea island (just 7km long) off the German mainland, from Norddeich harbour. Flights take place only at certain times of day with the parcelcopter flying the 12km in airspace restricted for the parcelcopter with no overflying of houses. There is a ground station for the flight which is in constant contact with regional air traffic controllers.

[...]During the trial, it will fly when ferries from Norddeich and piloted flights are not available. DHL envisages it being used to deliver up to 1.2kg of medications -- pills and so forth -- and other urgent deliveries to Juist, where there is a parcelcopter-only landing field. From there DHL couriers will complete the delivery by using cars or bicycles -- high-tech meets low-tech.

AndyTheAbsurd writes:

Round rocks on Earth are usually the result of erosion in an aquatic environment - something that Mars hasn't had for a very long time.

Read the rest here: http://news.discovery.com/space/curiosity-finds-a-weird-ball-on-mars-140924.htm

tt0077355 writes with an article from Reuters:

Security experts say criminals are increasingly targeting the $3 trillion U.S. healthcare industry, which has many companies still reliant on aging computer systems that do not use the latest security features.

The data for sale includes names, birth dates, policy numbers, diagnosis codes and billing information. Fraudsters use this data to create fake IDs to buy medical equipment or drugs that can be resold, or they combine a patient number with a false provider number and file made-up claims with insurers, according to experts who have investigated cyber attacks on healthcare organizations.

Medical identity theft is often not immediately identified by a patient or their provider, giving criminals years to milk such credentials. That makes medical data more valuable than credit cards, which tend to be quickly canceled by banks once fraud is detected.

AnonTechie writes:

Joab Jackson at PC World reports:

While administrators scramble to fix the newly discovered Shellshock vulnerability, Harvard University researchers are putting the finishing touches on a scripting language built to mitigate the damage caused by such holes.

The language, called Shill, was designed to limit shell-based scripts so they can’t access resources beyond what is specifically needed for the task at hand.

“You want to give the script exactly the permissions it needs to get its job done,” said Scott Moore, a computer science doctoral student at Harvard who is one of the contributors to the Shill research project, led by Stephen Chong, an associate professor of computer science.

The team is working on a version of Shill for the FreeBSD Unix operating system and is mulling the idea of porting it to Linux. The team will also present the technology next week at the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation conference USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation conference, in Broomfield, Colorado.

turgid writes:

The Guardian web site carries a story about Accelerated Christian Education schools, of which there are approximately 60 in the UK in which secondary school-age children are indoctrinated with fundamentalist Christian propaganda in place of the conventional secular syllabus.

Very worryingly, the "science" education is a mix of vaguely plausible (but wrong) pseudo-scientific factoids mixed with quotations from the bible. In one instance, the claim is made that, due to the angle of the spokes on snowflakes being 60 degrees, it should be possible to extract electric current directly from snow "eliminating the need for costly, heavy, and complex equipment now needed to generate electricity." Needless to say, scientists have likened this claim to bovine excrement "on stilts".

The English education system permits state-funded faith schools where pupils can be indoctrinated into a particular religion in the course of their studies, and there is no restriction on which religion can be taught. Faith schools have been very popular since they appear to have better academic results than conventional comprehensives, mainly because they select their pupils by ability and complicity. It is not uncommon for parents to adopt a religion superficially in order to get their children into such a school (traditionally Church of England or Roman Catholic but increasingly Jewish and Muslim).

Does religion still have a place in the state-funded classroom? Is it not dangerous for society to proactively support ignorance, superstition and sectarianism?

freesword writes:

According to this Engineering.com story, researchers at MIT are working to develop a skin tight spacesuit by utilizing shape-memory alloy (SMA). While a conventional spacesuit is a balloon of gas providing the necessary one-third atomosphere of pressure to survive in the vaccuum of space, SMAs might provide pressure directly to the skin through mechanical counter-pressure, resulting in a form-fitting yet flexible spacesuit.

The team is working with a coil design conceived by postdoc Bradley Holschuh.

To train the material, Holschuh first wound raw SMA fiber into extremely tight, millimeter-diameter coils then heated the coils to 450 degrees Celsius to set them into an original, or “trained” shape. At room temperature, the coils may be stretched or bent, much like a paper clip. However, at a certain “trigger” temperature (in this case, as low as 60 C), the fiber will begin to spring back to its trained, tightly coiled state.

The researchers rigged an array of coils to an elastic cuff, attaching each coil to a small thread linked to the cuff. They then attached leads to the coils’ opposite ends and applied a voltage, generating heat. Between 60 and 160 C, the coils contracted, pulling the attached threads, and tightening the cuff.

“These are basically self-closing buckles,” Holschuh says. “Once you put the suit on, you can run a current through all these little features, and the suit will shrink-wrap you, and pull closed.”

The team still need to overcome the challenge of keeping the suit in it's trained state which would require either maintaining the "trigger" temperature or a locking mechanism to keep the coils from loosening and are looking into several designs for the placement of the coils.

Blackmoore writes:

Science Blog - Chemists Observe Key Reaction for Producing 'Atmosphere’s Detergent'

A University of Pennsylvania team has now observed one of these rapid atmospheric reactions in the lab. They identify an important intermediate molecule and track its transformation to hydroxyl radicals, also demonstrating the amount of energy necessary for the reaction to take place.

Their findings help explain how the atmosphere maintains its reserves of hydroxyl radicals, highly reactive molecules that are called the “atmosphere’s detergent.”

Lester’s team is now the first to track a Criegee intermediate through the reaction that results in a hydroxyl radical, using a technique known as infrared action spectroscopy.

“We used a laser to generate a ‘fingerprint’ of this intermediate molecule, based on the wavelengths of light it absorbs,” Lester said. “The laser also supplies the energy necessary to drive the reaction, which would be provided by heat under atmospheric conditions.”

“At the end,” said Beames, “we also detected the hydroxyl radicals, so we’re the first to actually show that the hydroxyl radicals are produced directly from the Criegee intermediate.”

“We see that a hydrogen atom from one end of the intermediate molecule transfers over and bonds to an oxygen atom on the other side,” said Liu. “The molecule then breaks apart, resulting in a hydroxyl radical.”

mcgrew writes:

What do astronauts and cosmonauts, a towel and a paranoid android have in common?

The answer is 42.

Space.com says:

The International Space Station's Expedition 42 crew, who is set to take up residency onboard the orbiting laboratory in November, has embraced the connection between their numerical designation and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," the Douglas Adams' sci-fi franchise, adopting its imagery and slogans for their official poster and unofficial patch.

The article is, of course, much longer and has a photo of the poster, emblazoned with "Don't leave Earth without it! The Expedition 42's Guide to the Galaxy."

What would Marvin say?

CoolHand writes:

This Dutch built prototype of a new style solar car does not skimp on features, and still claims a 500 mile range.

They said cost to build this prototype was "enormously expensive" but believe it can be manufactured for the price of "a normal car." And, of course, they hope it will be available in "five to ten years."

AnonTechie writes:

PC World reports:

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is concerned about moves by Apple and Google to include encryption on smartphones, the agency’s director said Thursday.

Quick law enforcement access to the contents of smartphones could save lives in some kidnapping and terrorism cases, FBI Director James Comey said in a briefing with some reporters. Comey said he’s concerned that smartphone companies are marketing “something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law,” according to news reports.

An FBI spokesman confirmed the general direction of Comey’s remarks. The FBI has contacted Apple and Google about their encryption plans, Comey told a group of reporters who regularly cover his agency.

[Additional Coverage]:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/25/fbi_boss_slams_google_apple_for_encryption_that_puts_users_above_law/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/25/james-comey-apple-encryption_n_5882874.html